OSHA probably cares.

The company should care, because if the workers are dropping off because of heat stroke, they’re not creating value for the shareholders.

I gave up on Facebook when they banned my account for the second time after providing evidence that I exist in both cases.

Technically, my account is still “under review”, for the past 8 years.

I used this name, Mystik Incarnate, because, believe it or not, there are more people who know me by this name, compared to how many know me by my legal name.

I remember that Facebook challenged my name back in the day, like 10+ years ago. I took a form of ID and made it say “Mystik Incarnate” as my name, sent that in, and they unblocked my account for a while. A few years later and they did it again. By then, I was already on the fence whether or not I wanted to maintain a Facebook account… But I submitted basically the same thing and… Well… It’s still “being reviewed”.

I do have an account under my legal name, mainly as a collector of messages for people that know me professionally or something that are trying to reach out. I check it every few months at most; but that account has no friends, no connections, nothing. I only keep it so people can message me. I don’t use their apps or anything, I only log in on the website and usually incognito so that they can’t track me across the web.

Every time I see someone’s logged in Facebook account, I’m disgusted by how cancerous it has become. Anyone who reaches out to me on that platform I usually try to have them connect with me by email, or some other chat program that’s more trustworthy.

Fuck Meta.

It really doesn’t do much and the cost is barely pennies per user when you operate at scale. The largest costs will be for the DNS resolver service and the domain registration, both of which you are already required to have, in order to have a functioning presence on the Internet. The cost of the issuing intermediate certificate is probably the largest single cost of the whole operation.

To be fair to Plex, they run some intermediary (caching) metadata servers to offload the demand their users put on services like the tvdb and IMDb. Honestly, is probably not required… But they do it. (I’ve seen their caching system fail more often than either site, so, it’s not all good), but even with that, you can put most of that load into your existing webhost, and it’s unlikely to make an impact on performance.

When you do this stuff at scale, the costs of simply having it set up, usually cover the costs of using it for thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.

I have two pieces of paper from my time in post-secondary education. One says information technology, the other says business. I’ve worked in an IT field for well over 10 years in a B2B capacity. I’ve had to handle cost/benefit and ROI arguments with customers, and justify having them spend incredible amounts for their own good.

Are we done dick measuring about what we think we know?

Listen, we’re not going to agree on this. I couldn’t give any fewer shits if you do or not. Bluntly, I’m unbothered.

Good day to you sir.

I have a very good knowledge of business operations.

They already offered Plex pass to earn their income. Plex is an extremely price elastic product, given that alternatives like jellyfin exist. They are taking features away, and charging people if they don’t want to lose those features. That’s a really good way to piss off your existing userbase (or customer base). Better would be to offer something new, and charge for that. Keep existing products at the same cost, but have “better” products at a premium. You won’t get a huge number of people buying the extended product, but it will likely be more new paying users than how many you would get with the crap they’re doing now, and they wouldn’t lose any customers in the process.

When you understand the social and economic factors here, this is a super idiotic move. When you’re only looking at how many dollars you can extract from the customer base, this is a golden idea… I mean, it will fail, but it looks golden if you’re only looking at the money numbers.

I would question whether you know how a business works (or whether Plex does, for that matter).

As far as I’m concerned, Plex failed to read the room. They were already walking a fine line with the people in a legal grey area, which comprised a good amount of their customer base (those that are sharing media at least). There’s a nontrivial number of people who share media that are rather paranoid with reason. Nobody wants the RIAA/MPAA to have any reason to investigate what you are doing on the Internet. We all know how well that goes from the whole Napster thing. So now than a few are almost tinfoil hat level of paranoid. Many have already jumped ship to jellyfin or something similar. The rest are either unconcerned, not paying attention, or simply don’t care. I would argue that the numbers of people who run servers currently that host content using Plex, that are not looking at alternatives because of this, is pretty damned low.

Plex alienated the group that brought everyone into their umbrella. When the people who host media entirely abandon their product because of this shit, their client base vaporizes.

Can’t have a product or company with no clients. At least, not for long.

I am also a Plex pass person. Multiple times over in fact. I actually have a dedicated account for my server administrator that’s separate from the account I use to watch content. Both have Plex pass lifetime.

I’ve been familiar with this coming down the pipeline for a while and because I have Plex pass, I too, am unaffected, as are my users.

At the same time: here is a piece of software that I paid for. It’s “server” software, sure, but it’s just a software package. What it does isn’t really relevant. The fact is that it processes data stored on my systems, processing by my systems, using my hardware, and sends that data over the Internet, using the Internet connection I pay for separately, and delivers that data directly to the people I’ve designated as capable of doing so.

The only part of this process that Plex, the company, has any involvement in, is limited to: issuing an SSL certificate, managing user accounts and passwords, and brokering where to find data (pointers to my systems).

You can get a free SSL certificate from let’s encrypt. User accounts, authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA), is a function of pretty much everything that you remotely connect to, whether a Windows SMB/cifs share, your email, even logging into your own local computer regardless of OS… And honestly, brokering the connection isn’t dissimilar to how torrent trackers work, DNS or a goddamned IP address punched into a browser.

They’re offering shockingly little for what they’re asking, and the only thing that’s on the list that would be costly in the slightest is having a DNS name for the server (registration of the domain, DNS services, etc). And given the scale that they’re doing these things at, the individual costs per name is literally pennies per year.

This is not a good look at all.

I have domain names coming out of my ears. I’m tempted to buy one more and just offer to anyone that wants it, to have a subdomain name under that to run their Plex alternative on, so you can get a let’s encrypt SSL certificate, and stay safe on the Internet. I don’t want the feds snooping into what totally legal Linux ISOs are being shared.

I just don’t know how to program at all, so I have no idea how I would go about setting up a system for that. The concept would be to automate it, and have people create an account, then request a DNS name under one of my DNS domains, and have a setting if you want it to have an A record, AAAA record, or cname (if you have a ddns setup). Once the request is in, it would connect to be DNS provider and add the record for you.

The part I’d want to have as a check on the system is to make sure that you’re hosting jellyfin or something from the address you submit, to prevent people from using it for unrelated purposes; but even with that… Do I care of people do that? Probably not. I would limit how many addresses you can have per account.

You only say that because you’re at the bottom.

/s (obviously)

I just upgraded to a Xeon E5 v4 processor.

I think the max RAM on it is about 1.5 TiB per processor or something.

It’s not new, but it’s not that old either. Still cost me a pretty penny.

I think I’ve already watched this. Interesting stuff.

Pretty much everything gets it wrong in stone capacity. Some get very close, but fall short of representing radio in reality.

Just don’t.

As a qualified amateur operator, I’ll just say: that problem isn’t exclusive to die hard movies, nor die hard 1.

I had to stop playing when I saw the review for AC 3 (I think) from Zero punctuation.

He pointed out that the quests were almost entirely “gofer” quests… You know, you go over there and get that, then go fer that other thing and go…

I started the game not long after and I have to say, he was right. And every time I was given a quest to go somewhere only to talk to someone with little to no reason for doing so other than, I have nothing better to do in the game… When that happened, I heard his voice in my head talking about how annoying gofer quests were.

It annoyed me, and I stopped playing as a result. Never got past the first chapter.

To me this is par for the course. Corpos steal from you before you get it (wage theft), and “charity” manipulates you into the same, but you’re a “willing” participant in the process of having your money taken.

Pretty much everyone who is classifiably “rich” has gotten there by taking a small amount from a large number of people, usually on an ongoing timeline. The formula hasn’t changed. If you don’t have a hundred people giving you a small amount consistently, you’re probably not going to become rich.

As someone who worked in an office with relatively low walked cubicles, it’s very disruptive to work that requires a level of concentration.

There are no screws.

… those are nails

That’s truly surprising.

Thanks for sharing.

Honestly, I didn’t expect that Epic would be okay with this.

It’s nice to see, and bluntly, after a game has gone through all the different stages of buying and owning, why not make it free? Makes it that much easier for nostalgia nerds to have awesome LAN parties.

I don’t think this makes up for the long list of consumer hostile things that Epic has done, but it doesn’t hurt.

The next thing I’d like to see is to have games open sourced when stuff like this happens and the game is well into obsolescence. At least someone can pick up the mantle that studios don’t want to have anything to do with, when it comes to making the game compatible with newer operating systems, or alternative operating systems (like Linux, though I think UT supported Linux), or so that it can be built for new architectures like Apple’s new arm based silicon.

There’s no profit in the game anymore, so just let people have it so they can fix what you don’t care about anymore.

How dare you!

I made the foolish mistake of thinking things had finally started to make sense when Netflix happened, and I got my hopes up that going legit would be viable.

Oh well